> Can it easily interact with local data stores for elaborate data mining and updatable queries?
Pushback -- neither excel nor sheets are the right tool for that job.
Pushback -- neither excel nor sheets are the right tool for that job.
- No other tools are made available to them by their hidebound, ossified IT;
- They don't have training in SQL or other query languages, but they are WIZARDS with pivot tables and related technologies.
One thing that's hard for tech folks to really internalize is that tool choice is secondary to results for many folks. That's okay. It's especially ok if organizational factors prevent better or more "appropriate" tools.
The people you describe still exist, just like me and my fellow emacs users. But we’re not the future.
R and Pandas are cool, but they do not appear to be gaining market share from people using pivot tables and Power Query in our market.
I’d posit that customers of “high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers” is starting to get niche.
Again, my point isn’t to say that these people don’t exist. My point is that “data wizard” increasingly means not Excel. Plenty of non-tech firms are happy to hire entry-level “data scientists” who write some SQL queries, gin up some reports with spiffy graphics, and bang together a dashboard in Shiny or Tableau. It used to be that this kind of basic reporting work was done almost exclusively with Excel. Even if Excel has exclusivity in some specific industries, Excel’s influence and utter dominance just isn’t what it used to be.
Put another way, I’ve taught intro R / Python skills to enough undergrad and grad students in professional career tracks to see that the future for Excel looks weaker than its past.